Dolphins Make Good Teachers, Expert Says

Disabled youngsters learn much faster from a dolphin-human team than they do from a plain old person, a Miami psychologist has found.

Midway through a six-month study at the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key, David Nathanson has observed significant learning gains among mentally and physically disabled children.

''We now have enough data to indicate success is almost beyond our wildest dreams,'' Nathanson said in a telephone interview from Miami, where he has a private practice and teaches at Florida International University.

The project may be the first to demonstrate that animals can teach, according to Nathanson, who presented his data this week at a meeting in Orlando of the International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine.

Studies have shown that animals can help people emotionally through companionship or, as with seeing-eye dogs, by performing sensory tasks. But Nathanson said that as far as he knows, no one else has proved that animals improve human learning.

According to the Delta Society, a national organization devoted to promoting and studying human-animal interaction, studies have shown that dogs can help retarded children learn. But Nathanson's work probably is a first for dolphins, said spokeswoman Tina Ellenbogen from Renton, Wash., outside Seattle.

In the study, which is paid for by FIU and the non-profit research center, Nathanson works with six boys from the Florida Keys who have mental and physical disabilities and are slow to learn and speak.

The boys, ages 2 to 10, visit the research center weekly for one hour, which is divided between learning from a teacher in a classroom and learning from a dolphin-human team at poolside. Four bottle-nose dolphins participate. The children are shown line drawings of objects and assigned, for learning purposes, a series of pictures they cannot identify. Nathanson observes how well they learn or remember the names of the objects.

In the first experiment, the teacher names an object, and the child who repeats or remembers it is rewarded with praise. In the second experiment, a picture board is thrown into a pool and retrieved by a dolphin before the teacher identifies it. If the child responds correctly, he is allowed to feed, pet or swim with the dolphin.

''With every child, teaching human language using dolphins was clearly superior to use of standard teaching procedures,'' Nathanson said in his presentation. ''In some cases a child vocalized or said a word for the first time in his life only with dolphins as part of the teaching.''

The novelty of dolphins was not a factor because the children became familiar with the animals before the study, Nathanson said. He also alternated each week's first teaching session -- sometimes the dolphin came first and sometimes just the teacher -- to guard against bias.

In 100 sets of trials, a 10-year-old who barely speaks gave 38 correct responses with a dolphin and only 7 without. One 2-year-old with Down's syndrome gave 19 correct responses with a dolphin and only two without.

''Their parents have watched from behind the mangroves in total awe,'' said Jeanne Burns, assistant administrator of the 30-year-old research center.

The reason the dolphins are so helpful, Nathanson suggested, is that they relax the youngsters and increase their attention spans. The slowness of learning among retarded children is a result of their short attention spans, he said.

Dolphins don't improve the learning of autistic children, who have a chemical disorder and can't process information until after the hormonal changes of puberty, Nathanson said.

Although many animals can hold a child's attention, he said, dolphins are ideal teachers because they are beautiful to watch and touch, and they move gracefully. The water also provides a buoyant, soothing atmosphere.

Nathanson, 43, said he hopes to expand his use of dolphins, perhaps to help blind children learn Braille and help Vietnam veterans reduce the problems of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He even envisions teaching cancer patients to deal with stress and perhaps slow the progress of their disease.

In finding the potential for dolphins to help people, Nathanson said, ''we have just scratched the surface.''